COMMENTS

This topic is not unknown to me...

I bought a tower case a while ago that allowed me to slot harddrives into trays with rubber mountings. They make perfect sense. Set the mountings up in such a way that the drives 'hang' off them. Ta-da. No vibration.

Wrong target market

Easy to find out

Just take a harddisk, measure the current of the voice-coil moving the heads with a transient recorder and read a few sectors on different tracks of the disk. Now look at how that changes when you lightly vibrate the disk.

This is trivially easy to do in less than a week by a semi-skilled worker with about 1500 Euros worth of equipment.

Xiotech comment

From Xiotech's Rob Peglar:-

In an otherwise interesting [story], I was surprised to find the lack of research and mention of the dozens of patents and R&D performed by companies like Seagate in the field of disk and disk enclosure vibration.

These patents date back to 1999 and before. While I certainly agree with the [original Usenix paper] author's hypothesis that rack-level vibration is to be minimized, he has ignored the work of making the storage enclosures themselves resistant to vibration, both internal and induced (harmonic).

In other words, focus on the enclosure itself, such as the work by Cunha et al on disk enclosures that significantly reduce vibration, so much so several patents have been awarded. Several of these patents and the inherent intellectual property within are embodied today in the Xiotech Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), so much so that the element is offered with a 5-year hardware warranty at zero cost.